Tech

Everything That's New in the Windows 8.1 Update

Windows 8 critics, this is it. The Windows 8.1 Update was made to fix everything you think is wrong with Microsoft's touch-friendly version of Windows.

That probably won't stop the complaints, but with this update, the new touch- and tile-centric Windows finally feels right on "traditional" mouse-and-keyboard setups, mainly laptops. Individually, the new features are fairly minor, but overall they represent a power shift for those machines — a reassertion of the desktop.

In Windows 8 and later 8.1, the desktop felt more or less like "just another app" among the array of live tiles on the Start screen. Even if you spent the majority of your time with desktop apps, it seemed that Windows was trying to throw you back to the modern environment (aka "Metro") every chance it got. Opening a simple photo, for instance, launched the Modern Photos, not a desktop app.

Now things are different. Post-Windows 8.1 Update, the desktop is felt throughout the experience on a laptop or "traditional" PC. (Touch-first devices, such as the Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2, get some of the updates, but the desktop stays in the background.) The effect is often subtle, but sometimes it's a godsend.

"We recognize that for a certain group of people — namely people who use a mouse and keyboard — we could have done a better job of building a bridge from where those people are currently to what we built inside of Windows," Christopher Flores, Microsoft's director of Windows client communications, told Mashable. "[The Update] is a collection of minor updates that we've done to complete the overall experience."

Anyone with Windows 8.1 will get the update on April 8. There's no manual download required — it'll happen automatically. Here's an overview of the most important changes.

Boot to Desktop Default

Windows 8.1 introduced the option to boot to desktop, but you had to hunt it down in a settings menu to engage it. Now your PC will boot to the desktop automatically. You can always change it back, of course.

Modern Apps in the Taskbar

The taskbar — the little ribbon that runs along the bottom of the screen in the desktop — somehow got a bad rap in the initial rollout of Windows 8. Modern apps didn't show up there, and even the Start button didn't want to be a part of it.

In Windows 8.1, the Start button made a dramatic return to the taskbar, and in the 8.1 Update, the apps follow. You can now pin Modern apps to the taskbar, switching between them without ever going to Start or using the left-side app drawer. The taskbar will even appear in any Modern app if you push down on the bottom of the screen.

To get users started pinning Modern apps, the update pins the Windows Store to the taskbar by default. "When you pin the Store by default to one of the most UIs in Windows, people start clicking on it," says Microsoft's Chaitanya Sareen, who led the visual design team for Windows 8 and 8.1. "There's a good chunk of people who aren't familiar with [Windows] apps. Putting that front and center has increased engagement."

Title Bars

As a kind of companion to the taskbar, a title bar drops down from the top of the screen when you launch a Modern app, then goes away after a few seconds. These are actually not new — they're actually borrowed from the Windows desktop apps' full-screen modes, probably most used with Internet Explorer. Moving the mouse pointer to the top of the screen brings the header back anytime, and it includes icons for closing and minimizing.

"This is the Windows DNA," Sareen says. "People see the familiar controls — minimize, close — and we were very pleasantly surprised that in our usability study we had 100% success of people getting out of a Modern app."

Desktop Apps Are Default

One of the more frustrating things about Windows 8/8.1 has been it favoring of the Modern UI at inappropriate times. If you, say, double-clicked on a video file, it would instantly launch the Modern version of Windows Media Player, thrusting you into the full-screen experience even though you probably didn't want or expect that to happen.

The 8.1 Update does the more sensible thing and by default will launch the desktop versions of those apps when you click. It's a subtle change that really makes a huge difference for ease of use. Of course, you can alter the defaults if you wish.

"The feedback we got is 'I like [Modern] apps, but I like to go there on my own terms,'" says Sareen.

Search and Shutdown Icons

Even though you can search just by typing from the Start screen, that's not immediately obvious to new users. So the 8.1 Update adds a search icon to the top right of the Start screen to bestow a visual clue. Likewise, there's an icon for shutting down the machine, which was previously a swipe away. A little redundancy never hurt anybody.

Sareen explains: "There are some people who totally got on that train and can just type and they trust the machine. Others need that cue. So we just added that cue back."

Little Things

The 8.1 Update includes a few other tweaks. When you search, Windows Store apps will show up in the results, which gives developers another way users may discover their apps. Live tiles now have proper right-click menus for mouse setups. The "All Apps" list has better markers for new apps as well as notifications. The OS disk image is smaller for some machines, freeing up a little more device storage. And Microsoft added back some functionality in Internet Explorer so certain enterprise customers will finally have a web browser with their customized apps.

The Final Fix?

Unlike some of the upgrades in Windows 8.1, the changes in the Windows 8.1 Update are almost universally subtle and minor. So why did Microsoft take so long to implement them?

The company isn't saying officially, but from the pattern, it's easy to discern an admission that Microsoft perhaps went too far in designing a touch-friendly version of Windows. While it was a potentially powerful tablet OS, many of the features weren't really suited for traditional PCs, which the majority of users had at the time.

Now, finally, Microsoft has seen the error of its ways and given back the desktop-centered Windows that power users crave. With the Windows 8.1 Update, the current version of Windows is about as good as it can get. If you've been holding out on upgrading, now's the time.

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